Tragedy Exposes 'The Big Lie'

The suppression of the facts is by no means the most dangerous aspect of any Big Lie. After all, facts don't go away even amid efforts to suppress them. All sorts of inconsistencies, impossibilities and clues remain behind, and sometimes in plain sight, for anyone who cares to look. The real threat the Big Lie poses to society comes when it is not stopped in its tracks, exposed and trashed for what it is -- a lie -- but rather accepted, accommodated and, indeed, treated as if it were the truth. At that point, a Big Lie is a big success, having created an alternate reality that turns its very targets into hapless accomplices.

Unfortunately, that last bit describes most Republicans' supine reaction to the reaction -- the Big Lie -- about the Arizona massacre.

Much has already been written about the heinous movement on the Left to blame conservative politicians, political groups and pundits -- but mainly Sarah Palin -- for causing the crime, for creating the conditions unique to the crime, with "heated rhetoric" and "violent imagery." Without even examining the violence (note to liberals: I use the word metaphorically) this specious argument does to the First Amendment, I say this argument is a Big Lie.

Violent imagery ("battleground states," for goodness sake) and figures of speech are not only unexceptional in politics across the board, they are prevalent in ghoulish excess on the Left. I recommend that every reader visit Michelle Malkin's website to view her greatest-hits gallery of berserk Leftist "violence," from "Abort Palin" bumperstickers, to Bush assassination imagery, to our own President Obama's unforgettably thuggish rhetoric from the 2008 campaign trail: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Then there is the ongoing lie within the lie (which is how Big Lies are constructed) about Sarah Palin's infamous list of "targeted districts." Assorted MSM outlets have displayed her political map that put swing districts in the cross-hairs; none of these outlets have reproduced the official Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee map that similarly "targeted" such districts in 2009 with bull's-eyes, featuring, for example, "Targeted Republican Thaddeus McCotter -- Michigan's 11th District." If I can find it online, why can't they?

Diana West is the author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (St. Martin's Press, 2013), and The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin's Press, 2007).